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How Russian artists bring an untold beauty and warmth of Soviet childhoods

With exceptions, most media, literature written by US or UK writers have presented a somewhat cold, grey picture of life in USSR.

In the last year, I have been to 2 different exhibitions which don’t attempt to gloss over suffering but bring a warm view of life in social apartments too.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov’s sculpture of a kind of Soviet twitter. Each piece of paper has different short messages that represent daily living amongst different household objects. You can imagine the neighbours all talking to each other

Ilgiz Gimranov sharing his love and warmth of childhood in early Soviet housing…we loved playing in the snow and didn’t want to stop even when our mothers called us in as we were late for dinner…